Holy Creatures

MaryJune Haines 

Smoke rises in the east at dawn. At noon. At close of day.

The sky has been a sickly green-yellow bruise so long, she can’t remember the blue and white it was before. The seasons have warped. Autumn trees drop their leaves in blistering summerland. There is no snow; instead, black flakes coat the fields and crystallize to obsidian when all freezes over. Her rabbits’ hocks burn on the scorched ground no matter where she keeps them. Pain makes their lean meat bland and dry.

Before, when it came time for butchering, she would clip off the feet to sell as tokens of luck to the women in town. Even when hope had become scarce, some still clutched the tokens to their cheeks and whispered their husbands’ names.

But there are no women left anymore, waiting for their sons and husbands and fathers to return from the front. She is the last.

She feeds only herself.

She slits the rabbits at their spines and skins the hides, cuts to the brains to tan the pelts. She snips off the ears and tails and lays them out to dry. Same goes for the small things lungs: treats for the hounds. She roasts the meat until it crisps, the flesh and the organs both. She gnaws the fatty bits for a long time, crunching cartilage between her molars, and boils the bones for broth. When the bones are scraped of every scrap of muscle, she puts them down among the embers and lets them bake until they are tender enough to split between her fingers, and then she eats those too.

Perched high in the oak tree, a barn owl watches. It opens its beak in a wide triangular gape and spits out a pellet the size and shape of a child’s heart.

Once upon a time, the violence had seemed a world away. Then it was in the house with them: the call for the men to fight.

On the eve of her husband’s departure, she’d screamed and torn her hair and his, accusing him of condemning her to widowhood.

“My love,” he murmured, kissing her angry tears. “I will come back to you.”

“You never should have come to me at all,” she told him.

“I was bewitched. What was I to do?”

His promise is her curse; she fuels it with her love and anger, with her hope. At the edge of the barren woods, the edge of the world that might have been, she keeps a weather eye on the horizon.

࿓

The owl has not gone. It has not moved all night into morning.

She wonders aloud, “What do you mean by loitering here?”

The owl turns its head.

“Do you think you frighten me? Or them?” She gestures to the pen where her rabbits skitter.

The owl blinks at her. She watches it a while, her lips pressed together. Then she goes to the brittle grass where the oak used to cast a shadow and finds the pellet the owl spat out the day before. She pulls it apart between her fingers, identifying the delicate bones of rodents intact between clumps of matted fur. Reverently, she sets them aside.

The pads of two fingers brush something smoother and colder than bone. Her breath catches. She knows the touch of this silver as well as she knows the curve of her husband's sharp hip.

“No,” she whispers. No, no, no, no no no no.

She faces the owl. “Where?” she asks. It turns its head. “Show me,” she says. It spreads its wings soundlessly.

In the house, she dons her oft-darned old coat, the one she stole from him years ago, one silver button missing from its lapel. She winds a scarf around her mouth and chin three times. She fills her pockets with hard bread and dried meat. The hounds follow, tongues lolling from their mouths, the change in routine exciting. But they will drop back, she knows, once they realize the direction she's headed.

The smells of war assault her before long: rank, humid odors of death. She pulls the scarf between her teeth but cannot plug her nostrils. No less determined, the cold silver button pressed into her palm, she walks on.

࿓

The first corpse she comes across is face-down in the dirt, arms and legs sprawled but all intact. The same cannot be said for the second, and the third, the fourth, tenth, thirteenth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth.

The dead blanket the fields in a carpet of carnage, stiff limbs and torsos and bloated faces, shattered skulls from caved-in helmets. Weapons drown in thick stagnant rivers of crimson, no more use to the men in death than they’d been in life. Far away, the lightning and thunder rumble wears on, but it is an exhausted ambiance. A plea for an ending that will never come.

She doesn't turn back when her gorge rises, calling up the taste of last night’s rabbit. She cannot look away. She has to see them all.

And among the dead: the scavengers.

Crows. Vultures. Hogs. Coyotes. They pick at the corpses indiscriminately, sharing in the spoils of war. They eat with a vigorous, mute patience: the birds with their keen beaks and sharp taloned claws digging in just the same as the hogs, once-domesticated farm animals let loose from their pens to fall back into wildness. Unlike the birds and coyotes, the hogs chew through the clothing as well as the flesh.

They glance up when she comes near, alert but indifferent to her presence. Perhaps they notice her own singular need, her blooming wildness. She doesn’t stop to eat but takes bites of food as she walks between the dead, finding no reprieve from the humidity of her own foul breath.

The sallow sky darkens into night.

She hoots softly and the owl, a pale blur overhead, returns her call.

࿓

She wakes still walking and, yawning, wonders how far from home she is.

The owl answers, alighting on an overturned wagon wheel at the bank of a red creek. It looses a screech and turns its head, pointing its beak down the bank of a red creek.

She should have resigned herself to not knowing—never truly knowing—but she has never been one for half measures. “Show me,” she says, her voice a scab.

But already she is falling down the bank and plunging her hands among the reeds and the dead, uttering apologies along with his name, searching for his face, his beautiful gentle face. She calls to him and when he doesn't answer, she knows. Before she even comes across him half-buried in the mud, she knows that he is no more. Even at his angriest, at her most disagreeable, he would always answer her cry.

She’d never known him pale, not even in midwinter. This man beaten down into the red mud must be his lost twin, a trick of nature, his face and hands the gray of pulped paper, a gash in his throat caked over with a bubble of crusted blood.

“It’s a trick, my love,” she whispers, down on her knees, cradling the cold shell of him to her. “How dare you come back to me like this?”

How can this corpse be my husband?

She tears the scarf from her face and kisses him. She mouths his stiff bottom lip and then his neck, the spot on his neck that always made him shiver before. But she is the only one shivering now. “Come back to me, please, my love,” she whispers, her wet cheek pressed to his hard one. She kisses his cold lips again but he never stirs. He remains as he is.

He is remains.

࿓

She wakes to something gnawing on her fingers. She imagines a rat's small sharp teeth.

She laughs. “What can you do to me?”

Against the murk of the night, her barn owl swoops down and captures the rat in its talons. It squeals violently before the owl swallows it whole.

She watches, the laughter dying on her lips. “Here is cruelty,” she observes. “You beast. Portent of doom.”

The owl stares at her, the rat's tail hanging out of its mouth like a fat worm.

࿓

If pain is power, she thinks as she holds what is left of her love, I am more powerful than any person who came before me.

“If you come back to me, my love, there will be no more tantrums,” she croaks. She licks her cracked lips but her tongue is sandpaper. She swallows but there is no moisture left inside her save tears. Her pockets are empty. Even his silver button slid out of her grip, as she rocked his corpse like she would a child. She can no longer smell his stench or her own; the battlefield around them may as well be a field of wildflowers, abuzz with bumblebees instead of the flies that swarm all around them.

She closes her eyes. Sleep comes, and goes. She comes, and goes.

He remains. He is remains.

࿓

She thinks the flutter of stale wind is only her barn owl alighting. Until it is joined by another. And another. Her eyes open between fraying eyelashes.

The crows, intelligent black eyes cutting to her.

The vultures, beaks crusted with gore.

The dark-grinned coyotes on their haunches, watching.

The hogs, perpetually chewing.

She finds a voice she thought she’d lost. “Jealous,” she rasps. “Jealous monsters.” The chorus stares at her. “He’s mine. He’s not any of yours.”

A crow hops forward, glossy eye flashing.

She hisses and swipes at it though her arm is a dead weight, her hand hard and blackened. “I called him mine, didn’t you hear me? In death just as he was in life.”

To speak in a language they understand, she lowers her face and bites the hanging skin of his right earlobe. She gnashes her teeth and when it comes away from the rest of him, she chews and swallows it. She does the same with his left ear, and then the tip of his nose, his bottom lip. His eyelashes, still lush even in death, graze her forehead as she eats.

“Mine, see?” she says through her mouthfuls.

She sees the owl now, perched among the rest, its eyes fixed on her. “Always, we promised each other,” she entreats. “If I cannot follow him where he goes…what else is there for me here?”

The owl hoots a long stream like river-babble. Her eyes produce the last tears she will ever cry as it spreads its wings and takes flight.

Gone, all gone.

She drops her chin and kisses her husband’s mangled lips before opening her mouth to bite off more.

She remembers hunger.

She never forgot love. Grief never abandoned her.

His promise is her curse.

She sheds her coat—his coat—their coat. Her arms sprout feathers as she eats. Her hair falls out in sheafs. Her bones crack as they rearrange, as her body collapses into a low crouch. Her arms—her wings—spread wide around her and her favorite corpse, a shield against her fellow scavengers.

࿓

The vulture eats the corpse of a young witch’s husband for a long time, savoring every scrap of flesh. And when she’s finished with the meat, when only the bones are left, exposed to dull moonlight and starless sky, she eats those too.

࿓